Are you ready for Virtex-5? We are...

zwsdotcom,

I agree with Peter, it should not be that hard. I use Mozilla, and mostly Firefox as browsers. And, as long I enable cookies for the Xilinx site, I have not had any issues. But I believe you that you have had a bad experience in the past. I trust Peter to look into it.

Austin (on the road - presented at RADECS 2006 in Athens,Greece. Now in France to look in on our SEU eperimental platforms.

Austin

I've never seen anything approaching a reasonable explanation. xilinx.com simply Does Not Work properly from where I'm sitting. MSIE, Firefox, Safari on a Mac, Mozilla on a Linux box - NONE of them worked properly for me.

And results are distinctly varied, as you've seen from the responses in that thread I posted. People for whom it doesn't work, like me, REALLY have ENORMOUS trouble getting in. People for whom it "just works" seem to have no trouble even if they switch to a different browser.

Maybe Xilinx runs some load-balancing system that bounces visitors to different mirrors according to their geographical location, and maybe one or more of the mirrors is broken.

All this is a bit moot anyway. Xilinx has no rational reason to make people jump through these flaming hoops to get basic information about their parts. If they want people to go with other vendors whose procedures are less broken, they're going the right way about it.

Are errata considered at least *slightly* sensitive information? It's true that people can falsify registration information to get the info, but those getting the errata (as opposed to the data sheet) should agree to some specific issues regarding the errata; a good way to track that the agreement was accepted is with a registration.

While I understand there should be nothing like the experience you've seen to stand between an engineer and an errata, should this information be made available without condition? Ar is it just that the hoops should be simpler?

Agreed,

A Toulouse,

Austin

Peter Alfke wrote:

Peter Alfke schrieb:

there is one more issue to it - the errata (some errata docs) are available after click through kind of online NDA, but the documents itself have no NDA information in it, eg there is no notice that the document should be treated as if it is under NDA. There is at least some danger here, namly if your fellow engineer saves this document on some public download area in your company, or gives you a printed of copy of the errata document, then you are not aware that the original document was actually only available under online NDA - those if you make public comments on something related to that document then this could be classified as NDA infirgment - but you had no way knowing that the docuement was initialy classified. So IMHO the online NDA for the errata sheets is nonsense, either really NDA (properly signed!) and proper notice on the docs that are under NDA or then open access to the errata sheets.

Antti

I must also agree.

Here's my view as a system designer:

1. Errata are a fact of life in silicon. I have never met a device in the last 10 years that did not have errata against it.

1. If the device itself has no NDA requirement, then neither should the errata. The press _might_ make a meal of it, but probably not; designers expect it - indeed we welcome it because it makes our life easier if we know about issues.

That said, make it easy for me to design something in at the hardware level (easier than your competition) and I will live with other issues. Compiler / PAR etc., can be dealt with if I can at least design with the part, but that requires full disclosure at the time I am designing. If Xilinx makes it difficult for me to find that info, then I won't design with their parts - nothing personal, but that's the way it is. I have rejected certain vendors because they won't provide me with what I consider sufficient information _without jumping through hoops_ to design their parts.

I like Xilinx parts - indeed, a friend of mine used to be a Xilinx employee doing IP cores (and may still be for all I know), and that colours my view :)

So please - do the right thing and just make it open on the same page as the basic docs. (A lot of others do)

Cheers

PeteS

======== I am now addressing two issues:

1.Can we make registration easier, and 2.Should registration be required for downloading errata.

1. Regarding the problems with registration, the responsible guy within Xilinx tells me:

"We are in the process of completely redesigning the Web Registration system. Our existing system may be slow, but it is not that difficult to use. Remember, 1.5 million visitors come to our site every quarter and I haven't heard a complaint like this in years. From what I can tell things are working reasonably well. If this is not the case, perhaps we can pull something together to mitigate any existing issues as we continue to develop the new system."

Any comments? If you have specific gripes, e-mail me: snipped-for-privacy@xilinx.com We want to make it easy to evaluate, buy, and use our parts. Obviously.

1. Regarding the need for registration, we want to make sure that you look at the relevant errata for your specific order. Before accepting any ES order, we always ask you to acknowledge that errata, and we then ship the part with the errata print-out. Just to make sure. But I am still trying to get the errata documentation free of registration...

Peter Alfke, Xilinx Applications

Probably because the people who are too lazy to fill out the registration form are too lazy to complain as well ;-)

It's good of you to take these comments on board.

Cheers, Jon

Jon Beniston schrieb:

its not about the lazyness, but the overall 'feadback ratio' not so many people comlain and send feadback on their own.

my estimate is that you can only expect that out of 10,000

1 to 10 people commit feadback (bad or good) - so for every feadback receive on the some topic, multiply it by 1000 at least and you get a more likely number of potentially unsatisfied customers.

I meant that the fact there is not enough negative feadback on something doesnt mean it is done well. proper feadback is hard to obtain - the way Xilinx website requests surveys to be filled isnt really fulfilling the goal I think.

if I want to download some appnote for CPLDs but have to fill out the same form again and again - its just plain annoying for the customer.

one option would be to have on DVD with all downloadables from xilinx website (or set of 12 DVD's) so you want be looking at web all the time and get the registrations awaiting you at every corner.

I am not much complaing actually, I am used to annoying websites, but I can see that not all are as forgiving as I am

Antti

Or you could do it like Mentor. Everything that is only remotely interesting you can only access after logging in. And once you've logged in, you get an email the next day asking you to participate in an online survey to improve "the only 5 star support in the industry". And if you don't react, you get another email the next day...

Force people to feed back! :)

cu, Sean

Peter Alfke schrieb:

I have ML501 on the desk here!

a

Peter Alfke schrieb:

Peter,

the order wasnt placed immediatly so that the actual delivery time was below 2 weeks actually.

Antti PS but ML505 is still not orderable or is it?